Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika' at the Wilma Theater

By Dante J.J. Bevilacqua, For the Journal Register News Service

Friday, October 12, 2012

Epic, angry, raw and prophetic — filled with moments that ricochet from tragic to tender to scathingly funny all in a split second— Tony Kushner’s two-part “Angels in America” is an extraordinary piece of modern theater.

Created in the early 1990s, the play is fueled by Kushner’s fear, despair and rage over America’s refusal to confront the AIDS epidemic.

On the surface, the play is about AIDS and ‘80s politics.

A ballet of relationships of erstwhile father-figures, friends and lovers dance through the stresses of illness, addiction and identity. There are angels, ghosts and prophets.

Angels Part One: “Millennium Approaches” and Part Two: “Perestroika” won the Tony Award for best play in 1993 and 1994, respectively. Millennium has an air of desperation and foreboding, while Perestroika blends reconciliation with optimism, joy with pain.

Capable of being understood as a self-contained play, Perestroika continues from the final scene of Millennium, wherein an angel had crashed through the ceiling of young Prior’s apartment.

In “Perestroika”, we continue to follow the lives of a group of people touched and ravaged by AIDS in the 1980s: Prior Walter, whose lover Louis couldn’t handle it and walked out on him; the famed attorney Roy Cohn, diagnosed with the disease but refusing to admit it; and Joe and Harper Pitt, a Mormon couple torn apart by Joe’s sexual confusion.

It’s a diverse group of folks, and their lives intertwine in “Perestroika” even more than they did in “Millennium Approaches.” By the time it’s all over, Kushner leaves us with a message of hope, a far cry from the gloom and doom that ended the first part of his seven-hour epic.

Kushner’s writing is poignant to the point of harsh, but honest and compassionate. It’s witty, socially and politically aware and intelligent; however, the vocabulary at times is crude and vulgar.

The opening questions are asked by a character who never reappears: a blind Russian man who is the world’s oldest living Bolshevik. “Perestroika” is aptly titled not because it has much to do with the former Soviet Union but because it burrows into that historical moment of change when all the old orders, from Communism to Reaganism, are splintering, and no one knows what apocalypse or paradise the next millennium might bring.

Kushner subtitled the two Angel plays “A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.” All the male characters in both plays are homosexual, though a couple of them are initially in denial. The plays are heavily weighted toward gay love affairs, often sexually graphic, but Kushner also injects incisive observations on race and politics in America along with explorations of the nature of God and the topography of heaven — examinations which are not very favorable toward their subjects.

The core characters are a mix of real life and fictional figures. The dominant real life character is lawyer Roy Cohn, one of the most powerful and detested figures of the McCarthy era of the 1950’s. The major fictional character is a drag queen named Prior Walter, with his tangled romantic relations with politically liberal Louis Ironson and an arch-conservative Republican Mormon named Joe Pitt. The other key characters are Joe Pitt’s mentally unstable wife Harper, Joe’s mother Hannah, a black gay hospital nurse named Belize,

Superbly tragic and comic is Stephen Novelli’s larger than life performance as the doomed Roy Cohen. Confined to a hospital bed and about to be disbarred, he attempts to remain in charge of his life to the final moment. Shouting and swearing and haunted by the ghost of Ethel Rosenberg, who he doomed to the electric chair, Novelli turns in a marvelously spellbinding performance.

Benjamin Pelteson is exceptional as the gay, Jewish intellectual who is in love with Prior but just can’t stand to be with him when he’s dying. The rest of the cast stands out in smaller but pivotal roles and Mary Elizabeth Scallen is stunning in dual roles of Ethel Rosenberg and Hannah.

Today, the immediacy of the “Angels” themes has diminished and that may cost something in audience emotional response.

Scenes in “Perestroika,” have a mystical quality that some will find elusive. Even in this revised version, the ambiguities remain and the running time of three hours, forty five minutes is demanding. Not all the crossovers from reality to fantasy flow effortlessly. Angel’s is awash in apocalyptic purple prose that sounds eloquent and profound but sometimes makes little sense.

The “Angel in America” storyline may meander and Kushner’s more spiritual ideas are a long way from clear but in spite of the murkiness of the fantasy scenes, the writing holds the viewer, even as the clock ticks toward midnight in “Perestroika.”

“Perestroika” is certainly not for everyone. The subject matter will offend some, as will the language and sexuality.

But if acting is what it’s about for you, then this is the place to be. It would be harder to find a stronger ensemble than the crew at the Wilma Theater.